Joseph B. Walker - Writer

Cinematographer.
Nationality:
American.
Born:
Denver, Colorado, 22 August 1892.
Career:
Worked as wireless telephone engineer and inventor; then film cameraman
in middle 1910s; aerial cinematographer, and photographer of Red Cross
documentaries during World War I; 1920—first feature film as
cinematographer,
Back to God's Country
; 1925–52—photographer for Columbia; involved in technical
aspects of photography: invented the Double Exposure System, c. 1917,
several zoom lenses (the earliest in 1929), Duomar Lens for motion picture
cameras, 1931 (and for television cameras in the 1940s), the Variable
Diffusion Device, 1931, and the Facial Make-Up Meter, 1941, as well as
lightweight camera blimps and optical diffusion techniques.
Award:
Gordon Sawyer Award, 1980.
Died:
In Las Vegas, Nevada, 1 August 1985.

The Impatient Years
(Cummings);
Mr. Winkle Goes to War
(Green);
Together Again
(C. Vidor)

1945

Roughly Speaking
(Curtiz);
She Wouldn't Say Yes
(Hall)

1946

Tars and Spars
(Green);
The Jolson Story
(Green);
It's
a Wonderful Life
(Capra)

1947

The Guilt of Janet Ames
(Levin);
The Velvet Touch
(Gage)

1948

The Mating of Millie
(Levin);
The Dark Past
(Maté)

1949

Mr. Soft Touch
(Levin);
Tell It to the Judge
(Foster)

1950

Harriet Craig
(V. Sherman);
A Woman of Distinction
(Buzzell);
No Sad Songs for Me
(Maté);
Born Yesterday
(Cukor);
Never a Dull Moment
(Marshall)

1951

The Mob
(Parrish)

1952

The Marrying Kind
(Cukor);
Affair in Trinidad
(V. Sherman)

Publications

By WALKER: articles—

"Danger in God's Country," in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), May 1985.

By WALKER: book—

With Juanita Walker,
The Light on Her Face
, Hollywood, 1984.

On WALKER: articles—

Film Comment
(New York), Winter 1970–71.

Dusing, Lysa, in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), July 1981.

American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), March 1982.

Obituary in
Variety
(New York), 7 August 1985.

Obituary in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), October 1985.

* * *

Joseph B. Walker's career could have flourished in any of a number
of directions. His pioneering work in the development of the wireless
transmitter with Dr. Lee DeForest gave him a head start in the new world
of radio broadcasting. His lifelong fascination with the workings of
motion-picture cameras led him to put his name to an impressive list of
inventions: the first zoom lens patent, a comparator exposure meter, a
panoramic television camera, and many others. But it was as
cinematographer on some 160 feature films that Walker made his mark.

After some years of freelancing as a newsreel photographer Walker shot his
first feature,
Back to God's Country
, in 1919 on a formidable location near the Arctic Circle. For the next
seven years he worked steadily at a variety of minor studios, occasionally
with good directors like W.S. Van Dyke, Francis Ford, and George B. Seitz.
More often Walker photographed low-budget programmers. His huge collection
of camera lenses (and his intimate knowledge of their possibilities) made
him invaluable to the directors of these quickies. Walker could, by
changing lenses, shoot a close, medium, or long shot without moving the
camera, thus saving precious time in shooting westerns like
Fighting Courage
or serials like
Officer 444
.

In 1927 Walker photographed
The Warning
, directed by Seitz, his first film at Columbia. Walker was to remain
almost exclusively with this studio until his retirement in 1952. At the
time, Columbia was the least of the majors; Walker, through his long
association with Frank Capra, would help to change that.

Walker found Capra a most congenial collaborator, a director who could at
once keep a tight rein on his artistic vision while allowing Walker
remarkable experimental leeway. Though Walker was a master at composition
and elaborate camera movement, his most memorable images come from his
brilliant mastery of lighting: Barbara Stanwyck and David Manners by the
fireside in
The Miracle Woman
; the delicate mists of the moonlit haystack scene in
It Happened One Night
; the shimmering, Baroque visions of
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
; the stunning torchlight funeral in
Lost Horizon
.

Though Walker's best work was with Capra, the cinematographer also
had occasion to work with directors as diverse as Hawks (
Only Angels Have Wings
,
His Girl Friday
), Garnett (
The Joy of Living
), McCarey (
The Awful Truth
) and Schertzinger (
Love Me Forever
,
Let's Live Tonight
), George Stevens (
Penny Serenade
) and Alexander Hall (
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
). It's difficult, in fact, to come up with many first-rate
Columbia films of the era on which Walker did not work.

In his amiable and informative autobiography,
The Light On Her Face
, Walker quotes Columbia head Harry Cohn: "Y'know,
there's one thing that's always made me curious about you.
Practically
every
money-making picture we've had at Columbia, you've worked
on it. How do you account for that? And don't tell me it's
the photography! Photography doesn't sell pictures!" Maybe
not. But those silvery images stay in the mind long after the
movies' plots have faded from memory. The elegance of
Walker's cinematography even survives the indignities of being
shrunk down and contrasted out for television, though the delicacy of his
lighting suffers on video. Walker, like many another of his gifted peers
who worked predominantly in black-and-white, seem sadly relegated to a
medium for which their work was not designed and which does not have the
sensitivity properly to display the beautiful and precious images it chews
up as so much fodder. But should the viewer have the willingness and the
opportunity to return to Walker's films as they were originally
intended—on 35 mm film—he or she will find that there were
few more gifted practitioners of the art of cinematography.

—Frank Thompson

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